Somebody Better Be Dead

“Someone better be fucking dead up there,” he thought as he tapped his fingers angrily on the dashboard. His sweaty digits were leaving clean spots in the dust and cigarette smoke residue as they hammered furiously like a concert pianist playing a feverish solo. It was shameful how infrequently he cleaned out his car. There were assorted empty soft drink bottles and cigarette packs in the floor of the passenger side. The upholstery was pock marked with cigarette burns. The headliner was loose in a few places. The front passenger side window would no longer go down.

The tatterdemalion condition of his vehicle only made sitting in traffic in the hot July sun with no air conditioning all the worse. The sweat running down his brow was stinging his eyes. It had taken an hour to travel about a mile and a quarter. Most of that time, obviously, spent at a complete stand still. He could feel the rage building inside him as he craned his neck in a fruitless attempt to see what the cause of the backup was. It looked like it stretched all the way into Baltimore. There was no sign of it clearing up any time soon.

His mind continued to race. “I can’t believe this. Some idiot was stupid enough to get in an accident and now I have to sit here all damn day. Whoever caused this deserves whatever happened to them.” He knew that these thoughts were terribly insensitive. He knew that if some poor soul was dead or seriously injured ahead that he would feel like a total asshole. Still, he was clutching the steering wheel as tight as he could and mumbling under his breath, “C’mon, come, the, fuck, ON!” He had accidentally shouted the last word, which earned him a quick uncomfortable glance from the car next to him.

The most shameful part of this scene is that he had no appointments or obligations to which he would be tardy. He had nothing specific planned for his day at all. It was Sunday afternoon and he was on the way home to Baltimore from visiting some friends down on the shore. He was simply going home to sit his lazy ass on the couch and watch television or play video games and smoke weed. Hardly what one would call pressing matters.

The brake lights of the car in front of him, which felt like they were burned permanently into his retinas, suddenly went dark and they began to inch forward. He was able to move a whole 4 car lengths ahead this time. Just enough to see the mangled hunk of metal that was once two separate vehicles. There were emergency workers everywhere, fire trucks and ambulances standing by in case something exploded. He saw the stretchers being rolled away from the twisted heap and heard the sound of the ambulance sirens as they rushed the wounded away. The scene was incredibly chaotic, but it seemed to move in slow motion. He could almost hear the piano and strings coming in with some somber dirge to set the mood.

The angry voice in his head was suddenly replaced with one that was infinitely more contrite. “You are a selfish prick,” this new voice said as he came to the realization that someone was indeed “dead up there.” As he crept by the scene with his head hung low in shame, as if everyone there knew what he had been thinking just moments ago, he saw a little arm sticking up in what must have been the rear window of one of the cars in the crash. This was clearly the arm of a child, no more than 6 or 7 years old. It was spattered with blood and limp. “You may as well have killed that kid,” His own mind was now accusing him of all sorts of ill intentions. “Somebody better be dead, you say. Well, are you fucking happy, you pecker? Someone is dead, and it’s a little kid. Is that reason enough to delay your date with the couch?”

As he pulled out of the scene of the tragedy, his mind began to divide into factions. Half still chastising his insensitivity and the other half beginning to be annoyed that he was going to have to feel bad about this all day and ruin what time he had left before the work week began.

This was his usual way of dealing with these types of things. He would feel terrible at first and then start to grow weary of feeling so bad and get stoned. The event would get relegated to an interesting anecdote that he would litter with a few witty one-liners to make it less of a downer to relate to his friends and, POOF! This horrid event in someone else’s life, when they lost their child and were severely wounded themselves has suddenly become a tale about how bad HIS day was. “Man, yesterday sucked. I saw this accident where some kid was killed and I was stuck in traffic for like 3 hours,” he would undoubtedly say to an acquaintance, who would reply with something like, “Oh dude, that sucks. I’m so sorry that happened to you.” The thought would not even occur to the acquaintance that he was being a shallow bastard by glossing over the dead child to focus on the inconvenience of waiting in traffic and feeling sad and guilty about the accident.